Makerspaces

Over the last few years, I've watched from afar as Pittsburgh's Remake Learning initiative has blossomed into a resource-rich network. Its 533-member organizations are striving to inspire and equip the next generation of innovators, problem-solvers and critical thinkers through hands-on, relevant learning.

The makerspace isn't just a fixed space where kids come and go to complete busywork. It's an extension of a well established approach to educating students that has applications and deep implications across disciplines.

While more than half of school libraries in the United States and Canada (55 percent) offer maker programs to students, STEM isn't necessarily the biggest focus. The most common offering for almost four in five respondents to a recent survey (79 percent) was arts and crafts.

Pop-up makerspaces have allowed project-based learning to grow and blossom. Using higher-order thinking skills, students are given the opportunity to problem-solve, ask questions, think, create, innovate, fix and revise. A new set of learning theories have popped up as well. Innovation and design theory have become a way of learning, with entrepreneurship at the helm.

In addition to improvements in cost, the device reportedly allows for larger-scale printing and greater precision than many commercially available bioprinters. The team released its research under a Creative Commons license to encourage others to build their own as well.

Nearly all, 85 percent, of educators and policymakers in the United States, say they think creative problem solving is a very important skill for students to learn in school, according to a new survey. At the same time, 84 percent of educators and and 68 percent of policymakers surveyed said that there is not enough emphasis on creative problem solving in American education.

Students at MIT have designed a robot that can solve a Rubik's Cube in 0.38 seconds, setting a world record. Designed and built by a pair of students using the student-run hackerspace MIT Electronics Research Society, the robot broke the previous world record, set in 2016, of 0.67 seconds.

Pennsylvania's Montour Elementary School stands out even among schools that have embraced STEAM education, the maker movement, hands-on learning and augmented and virtual reality. So when the K–4 school opened the world's first "Brick Makerspace" — a Lego-powered STEAM lab developed and implemented in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University, Lego Education, parents, students and a local Barnes and Noble — it wasn't just a one-off affair; rather, it was yet another advance in the school's efforts to integrate principles of STEAM education throughout the curriculum.